Michael Jackson (1958-2009)

I must say that while I am not a fan of Michael Jackson, he was one of the most amazing entertainers of today.  The world is worst off for having lost this great entertainer.  I’ve not thought of him for a while now, until his unfortunate passing, but I got to thinking about how his movement has been influenced by great entertainers in the past century.  I started looking at some clips, and I came upon this great clip that put together a series of possible influences he might have had from so of the best entertainers in the past 50 years years or so.

Here’s a list of the performers appearing in sequence – Fred Astaire, Bill Bailey, Buck and Bubbles, Cab Calloway, Clark Brothers, Sammy Davis Jr., Daniel L. Haynes, Rubberneck Holmes, Patterson and Jackson, Eleanor Powell, Bill Robinson, Three Chefs (only the feet), Tip Tap and Toe (feat. Ray Winfield),and  Earl Snakehips Tucker.

Michael’s had tons of videos, but one my favourites is still an animation clip of the Jackson 5 from way back -

*A note from the author who posted the clip:

“The Jackson 5 was a Saturday morning cartoon series produced by Rankin/Bass from 1971 to 1973; a fictionalized portrayal of the careers of Motown recording group The Jackson 5. The series was animated mainly in London at the studios of Halas and Batchelor, and some animation done at Estudios Moro, Barcelona, Spain. The director was Spanish-American Robert Balser.

Other than appearing in the introduction, the actual Jackson brothers themselves—Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, and Michael—were unable to contribute to the show in any way due to scheduling conflicts. Only their music was used. A specially recorded medley of four Jackson 5 #1 hits—”I Want You Back”, “The Love You Save”, “ABC”, and “Mama’s Pearl”—served as the show’s theme song.

Like most animated comedies of the time, The Jackson 5ive contained a laugh track. The show debuted on September 11, 1971 and ran for two seasons on ABC.”

Beginner-Intermediate Class doing The Lindy Chorus and the Free Swing Taster Class

Hej from København in the spring! While I await this weekend’s workshop “CopHop”, here’s the clip from 2nd June’s Swing by the Flyer, where the beginner-intermediate class performed! Most of these people have had about 8hrs of Lindy Hop instruction all their lives, and they, of which they spent most of it learning a slightly simplified version of Frankie’s “The Lindy Chorus”, as part of the series of Frankie’s moves in the month of May to celebrate the Man’s life.  Good job all! Hope you had fun doing this.  Apologies to some of the followers from the Intermediate class who learnt this as well, but didn’t get to perform due to lack of leads (yes, the problem from the “Not Quite Right” entry has been somewhat solved)!

And if you’ve yet to learn how to do this, swing by at 8pm where there’s a free class to get you started!  Here’s a video of some of the people trying it out!

More from The Spirit Moves

Here’s a long seqence of clips from the documentary on traditional jazz dancing, The Spirit Moves, hopefully to keep you occupied while I update this site a little less often being on the road for a while.  These are some segments from the documentary though some of the routines that were posted here before, there are quite a few that have not.

The seqeunce of clips in this excerpt: The Tranky Doo (Pepsi Bethel, the choreographer, is in the middle, flanked by Al Minns on his right and Leon James on his left), The California Routine performed by Leon James and Esther Washington (which forms the basis of the group segment of Hellzapoppin), Frankie & Willamae doing a demo with aerials (the first being “Over the Back” which was the first aerial to be invented), the Big Apple (different ending from Frankie’s version in the movie Keep Punching shown in the 9th Sept 2008 entry), and some practice footage of dancing inside The Savoy Ballroom (the sequence beginning 7:52 is what they called “Stops” – choreographed sequences which people knew, if I am not mistaken, first done by Frankie, as inspired by Jimmie Lunceford’s song “Posin”).

Do check out the 28th Nov 2008 entry for more from the documentary.